A bandwidth market for traffic engineering in telecommunication networks
J. J. Combrink · SUNScholar (Stellenbosch University) · 2004
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Traffic engineering determines the bandwidth allocation required to meet the traffic loads in a network. Similarly an economic market determines the resource allocation required to meet the demand for resources. The term bandwidth market denotes traffic engineering methods that use economic market methodology to determine the bandwidth allocation required to meet the traffic loads. A bandwidth market is an attractive traffic engineering method because of its distributed nature and ability to respond quickly to changes in network architecture or traffic loads. Network terminology is frequently used to define bandwidth markets. Our approach is to use the concepts of microeconomics to define a bandwidth market. The result is that our bandwidth markets are similar to economic markets, which is advantageous for applying economic principles correctly. This thesis presents the theoretical basis for two bandwidth markets. The first bandwidth market is a framework for building bandwidth markets. The second bandwidth market represents a society of cooperating individuals. The society distributes resources via a mechanism based on economic principles. An implementation of the bandwidth market is presented in the form of an optimisation algorithm, followed by its application to several test networks. We show that, in the test networks examined, the optimisation algorithm reduces the network loss. For all test networks, the network loss achieved by the optimisation algorithm compares well with the network loss achieved by a centralised optimisation algorithm.